Classic Poem

When the great artist appeared with his miracles I thought of the plain facts of my own life and was ashamed:
I showed my back to this wonderful performer and returned as one dissatisfied among my fellows:
And the deeds I saw done in these hovels and holes and even in the palaces, shrunk to the measure of my unrest and became as ciphers to my calculating dismay:
And even the children were less than children, and the men and women less than men and women.
This was worship: this was my reach from the mud to heaven: this was to go into the dust and ask of life that it pardon me for having lived:
This strange awe before power and skill—this shudder of despair, this knave confession and fool regard.

So I too would be artist with the best:
And power visited my veins and stayed with me:
And I took all places other men had taken:
And whose voice but mine was the most admired?
And whose songs but mine were lauded by the schools?
And whose fame but mine was cherished by the academy?
And whose battles were so fought as were my battles?
And whose orations so much as mine stirred men?
And whose rulership was so absolute as mine?
And whose slaves so served a master as mine served me?
And God, seeing all this, meeking his ancient claim, abdicated and retired:
Leaving to me all realms of worlds—I who could crunch so much in my relishing jaws.

Out of me came thunder and lightning and fierce rains and currents bearing wrecks,
And my soul was lost in the din and terror of its own invocations,
And the enraged elements so swept the spaces nothing could hope to survive their cross purposes,
All my talents warred against each other, all my prides contested for priority.
This was what came in the travail of my passions, when power was let loose without love,
This was the largess of authority, this was the legend and entail of the despot.

And what could I do in the dire press of the storm I had summoned?
I had waved my hand and brought this about:
Would another wave of the hand still it all?
But with the crisis pale before me my palm would not lift:
O cloud, O sky, O sun, at last you had your revenge!

The sun came to me out of the sky, the cloud departed from my skull: how wonderful!
I flew to the bosom of my mother self again!
So the echoing emptiness of my soul was not without intention:
For bye and bye in the hungry rebellion of the retrieving spirit the flood came:
And when the waters rose I had space to receive them,
And in the bulging fullness of my renewed life the broken strands mended, strayed things found their way home, and the darkest shadows took in the most light.
Then I went about in accustomed haunts again:
And unclean things were clean, and common things uncommon,
And I could not tell the palace from the hut, they were so much alike,
And I could not tell black from white or criminal from saint, they were so much alike,
And all gods were so much alike they were transformed into one god,
And this god and myself were so much alike we too melted as into one frame,
And the simplest playact of the youngest child was so much like the profoundest speculation of the adept they could not be untangled.

Now all the fancied prizes were cheap and useless:
Now I gave genius back all its prestige:
Now I was contented to be alone with love and in the average practice of men:
I, who had taken my turn on the jovine heights:
I, who came away leaving all things there where I found them,
Envying their masters nothing.